Byurakan SETI conferences (1964 and 1971)

Two important early meetings on the subject of SETI
held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory.
The 1964 Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations stemmed from discussions
by Shklovskii's group at the Sternberg
State Astronomical Institute and was organized by Nikolai Kardashev.
Held three years after the seminal Green
Bank conference (1961), it was attended entirely by radio astronomers
and had as its aim "to obtain rational technical and linguistic solutions
for the problem of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations which
are much more advanced than the Earth civilization." The emphasis on (a)
communication, and (b) the broadcasting of powerful signals by highly advanced
intelligence from great distances (possibly even extragalactic), was in
contrast to the greater attention paid in the United States to searching
for messages from nearby stars and civilizations more on a par with our
own. The Soviet approach was typified by Kardashev's classification scheme
for technological races (see Kardashev
civilizations) and Troitskii's interest
in the possibility of detecting signals from other galaxies.1

The 1971 Byurakan conference was the first international SETI meeting and
was sponsored by the Academies of Sciences of both the Soviet Union and
the United States. Ambartsumian, Kardashev, Shklovskii, and Troitskii carried
out the organization on the Soviet side, while Drake,
Morrison, and Sagan
performed the same function on the American side. Participants included
28 Soviets, 15 Americans, and 4 scientists from other nations. Radio search
methods, techniques and consequences of contact, message content, and extraterrestrial
astroengineering were among the topics discussed. A tentative conclusion
of the conference was that there might be a million technical civilizations
in the Galaxy, although it was recognized that the Drake
Equation gave a subjective rather than an objective probability.2

References

Tovmasyan, G. M., ed. Extraterrestrial Civilizations: Proceedings
of the First All-Union Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations
and Interstellar Communication, May 1023, 1964, trans. from the
Russian. Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations (1967).